The CDC's Peddling of Misinformation About Vaping is a Threat to Public Health

For several years, respected voices in the public health community have warned of a breakdown in trust in their profession if the dishonest, damaging, and often vicious campaign against safer alternatives to smoking by some of their colleagues continues to misinform the public.

It is no surprise, therefore, that an editorial was recently published in the journal Addiction (authored by a group of public health experts from five major U.S. universities, as well as the Iowa Attorney General) criticizing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and U.S. Surgeon General (SG) for tolerating misinformation about vaping.

The authors highlight an advisory from the SG earlier this year, which declare that “[h]ealth misinformation is a serious threat to public health” and that countering it “is a moral and civic imperative.” The authors then note that the same SG’s office is guilty of promoting false claims that vaping is a gateway to youth smoking and that the CDC continues to falsely attribute a 2019 outbreak of lung injuries to nicotine vaping products.

This is not the first time that the CDC has been requested to cease spreading false information about vaping. In 2021, a group of 75 multidisciplinary experts wrote to the agency to ask that they clarify that nicotine vaping was not to blame for the 2019 outbreak, but the taxpayer-funded agency declined to do so. To this day, the CDC continues to sit by and allow widespread misinformation to prevail in the media and amongst conflicted academics.

The latest criticism of the CDC insists that “[p]ublic health officials, in particular the SG and the CDC, must do a better job” of explaining that the cause of the 2019 illnesses was not due to nicotine vaping, and that “public health recommendations should be based on solid causal data and communicated clearly and appropriately to the lay public.” The authors lament that the CDC is complicit in producing misinformation that leads to “aggressive e-cigarette regulation that many studies have shown leads to increases in combustible tobacco product use” and warn that correcting this misinformation must be “a public health priority.”

This latest plea to the CDC comes hot on the heels of recent research illustrating the disastrous effect of poor messaging on vaping. A study published last month by researchers at Cornell University detailed how misinformation is leading to staggering misperceptions amongst the public. So much doubt has been cast on the proven less harmful nature of vaping products compared to smoking that participants “question[ed] why one should not switch back to combustible cigarettes.” One participant was so misled by current messaging that they were convinced that “[s]moking e-cigarettes can give you conditions you never had before.”

This is not a trivial concern. In the United States, 480,000 people die annually from combustible cigarette smoking. And, a majority of those may not have had to if they had opted for safer nicotine delivery devices, the very same products that are subject to equivocal messaging on relative risk by the CDC.

The extent of absurdity to which such misinformation can lead came into sharp focus just this month with an astonishing case in Australia. Faced with a bombardment of false information from an Australian government advised by committed anti-vaping propagandists, a General Practitioner who found his 15-year-old son to be vaping apparently “has resorted to giving his son two cigarettes a day to replace the vape.” Considering that the risks of vaping are estimated to be less than 5 percent of those of combustible tobacco use, this is a damning indictment of those who are using their position to sow doubt and confusion about safer alternatives to smoking.

The new commentary from prominent and respected tobacco and nicotine policy experts for the CDC to stop misleading the public is not the first. The public trusts the CDC to provide sound science-based information, yet it is repeatedly exposed as a dishonest broker of sound and evidence-based information.

If the Surgeon General truly believes it is “an imperative” to campaign against health misinformation, he should take heed of the views expressed by experts in this editorial and re-order messaging from his own offices and those of the CDC. Anything less is a shameful and avoidable threat to public health.  

Martin Cullip is the International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance's Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.